Elements Gallery and the user experience are the latest topics of discussion …

A day after the misstep of launching a promotional Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac site bogged down with Flash and horribly-compressed video, an article with excellent screenshots has been posted to Mac Mojo, the MacBU development blog. The subject today is the user experience, though that in itself is telling because what's really being discussed is the user interface. Han-yi Shaw, User Experience Lead Program Manager, takes some time to explain the new Elements Gallery in Mac Office.

Well, it’s a visually rich gallery that allows you to quickly find commonly used, but often times hard-to-create elements. For example, many users know that you can create beautiful tables, charts and diagrams in Office, but not everyone knows where to find or create them. The Elements Gallery is intended to unlock the power of Office by making our rich functionality more discoverable and accessible. No longer do you need to search through hierarchical menus and tunnel through dialogs only to find another sea of commands. With the Elements Gallery, you can focus your time on exploring and perusing the collection of professional and attractive designer content.

It's tabs that expand to present templates. Not that expanding tabs or templates are bad things, just that attention given to this new UI element seems out of proportion to what it does. You click on a tab, you get another tab bar. You click on that, you get templates for footnotes, or spreadsheet objects, or themes, or lists—you get the idea. When you aren't using Elements Gallery, it occupies relatively little screen space, even if left viewable. Nonetheless, it is yet another "element" in a UI crowded with menu options, toolbars, a palette, and a Mac Plus with legs. Why not the Ribbon UI introduced in Office 2007 for Windows?

"The answer is actually a simple one: we’ve designed our UI for the Mac."

Whose Mac? For me, the "Mac Way" is better illustrated by the reorganization of the application preferences, a much appreciated improvement over previous versions and that horrible jumble of options.

The best UI is the one that doesn't have to "unearth" features, but rather leads the user to them--it's the difference between Apple and Microsoft that is as old as the user interface itself. One need only look as far as iWork to see that, but it is where the user experience of iWork fails that it begins for Mac Office.

The user experience of Mac Office means working with Windows: seamless Exchange support in Entourage, animations that just work between versions of PowerPoint, full compatibility of Word documents between platforms and versions of Word, VBA support in Excel—oops. While I understand why VBA support was lost, every time Mac Office loses a feature or fails in compatibility with Office for Windows, iWork becomes a more realistic alternative for the simple reason that no one can compete with Apple on "user experience" alone. Currently, Mac Office represents something like twenty percent of retails sales of Office, an astonishing figure when considering the respective market shares of Mac OS X and Windows, and a testament to just how important Mac Office is to the Mac. But perhaps it's time to shatter some allusions like glass as to why that is so.